Mercurial
by Kittehs
Summary: It was time for a decision to be made; to remain in Aboveland, or to return to Underland instead. But what will Alice decide? AlicexTarrant


There are moments in life when one feels the universality of their being like a vast, undying ocean stretching out from their fingertips. Brief snippets of time when the soul gathers itself into a tense, hot solid in the pit of the stomach, and if one were to merely dig their fingers into the soil, it might burst and seep forth into that molten core of the earth's womb. Moments when the hopes of men aren't quite so far from the seeming flippancy of butterflies, nor less fragile.

There were moments when she felt herself slipping past the edge of that tall, dark bow, stained dark with the blood of a thousand lives, tumbling into the ocean; moments where she might rest and sleep upon the soft, white sands of that bed and allow the salt to eat away at her bones until she become part of it forever, sweeping dreamily and lulling strong men with her infinitesimal beauty.

Then there are moments when the fantastic singularity of existence is analogous only to standing upon the white beaches of some vague island, staring across that ocean, and longing for unnamed shores. There are moments when the reality of the soul's discontent rushes up to greet you, and despite whatever crowds you may immerse yourself in, adventures you begin, poisons you consume, the damned truth remains the same. The ghostly pleasures of this world are merely an extension of the ghostly figures that haunt it, and just as brief; the unbridled soul is a teeming, wild entity that is doomed to pass through each life without mark or meaning, and fade as swiftly as it came.

There were days in which she occupied herself with wild fancies, days wherein she felt she had forcefully constructed some tether with which to bind herself to this existence. But there were nights, rare nights, when she saw the truth reflected in the baleful eyes of the moon, and felt the gentle rock of the ocean beneath her feet, and knew at once that she was adrift in her own sea. Those rays of silver, flitting through the columneas procession of clouds, their necks broken beneath the weight of the starry heavens, always pointed towards a distant shore in her heart.

She would sometimes sneak outside during these times, no matter if she were upon the sea, or perhaps at home in England, and she would strain against the latter-most rail of her current domicile, and stretch out her arms, and welcome the coming of foreign lands. It took her less than a year to realize that no land was foreign to her, for no place in heaven or earth concealed from her its hedonistic trinkets, its seductive rituals, or its people, sprung from a soil with far richer palette than her own home, quite so well as that other place, that land that was itself a dream within a dream.

In the solemnity of moonless nights the shadows hanging beneath the wild crests of the ocean would sometimes morph into fantastic forms before her eyes, drawing her so close to the periphery of memory that she would weep. But the sunlight banished all such notions from her mind. The waking hours painted everything in watery tones and washed all the lovely colors from her imagination. There was something about green that always dissatisfied her, as if it failed to meet some expectation she held. A ridiculous notion, perhaps, but she often wondered if it weren't the reason for her constant return to the open ocean.

To soft nights, liquid, dreamless nights, when the sky was brooding and the raucous waves were so like her own heartbeat. When the darkness around her dragged all flippancy from her mind and instead seemed to force her to focus upon him.

No, not the darkness. The darkness chased her inside herself and locked those wants away. It was the moon, the full moon. It blinked down at her with the same open rotundity of those eyes, his eyes. It held its scars just as close to the surface as his own heartbreaks. It was just as beautiful, punctuating the huge, open sky in that unctuous manner that he had.

Glorious beyond comparison and yet somehow always making her feel as if she owed it something; like it heaped compliments upon her merely by allowing her to stand so close within its peering, pure, stark light. It was whispering to her in the darkness, drawing her from ill dreams and to the edge of her balcony. The cement so cold and stark and rough that her toes ached and she scraped them across it merely to return clarity to the world. Or to the small, cloudy window in the belly of that ship, her fingers roving over the rusty bolts in the darkness, feeling that familiar cold there too. Or upwards, lifting her in some ghostly spectacle, towards the bow. Shivering and burning at the same time, standing bare save for her thin nightgown, and the sea salt misting over her skin and leaving everywhere aching with cold. A cold deeper than bones or blood or night air. A cold of ache. Of want. And that's when she realized that she truly had put all her affairs in order. All save for one.

"Headin' back to England, are yer Missuhs?" he asks her in that charmingly rough tongue of his.

"Yes Harding, I am."

He gives her one of his knowing winks from beneath those great, bushy eyebrows of his, crusted over with white from either salt or age, she's not sure which. When her eyes move back towards the ocean, staring at some distant point on the horizon without truly seeing it, he chuckles and lays a hand on her shoulder.

"Missin' someone?" he asks.

She doesn't miss the implication, and grins lopsidedly at him as means of answer.

"I suppose you could say that" she replies dreamily.

She doesn't need to be told which direction her home is. Just stares off into the empty space in that far beyond as if seeing everything upon its shores with perfect clarity.

"I'll miss ye', Alice" he mumbles, and she turns the full force of those eyes upon him.

Probing, mystified eyes brimming about now with wonder. But she doesn't ask him how he knows. He just does. He's seen that same look of sick desire upon so many faces now, he's hardly surprised. It's the same look on the facades of those creamy, petrified girls standing upon the docks as the great ship slices through the slapping waves, standing there and watching their husbands drift away. All mystified and solemn with their hats pulled down tight about their faces and their fists clenched in some starched, clean dress. Just watching and watching and nothing else, like if they look away it might be them floating away into nothing.

She nods her head at him once, and he moves away and she waits there all day until the cold chases her into the darkness and the full moon draws her out again. When they reach port the next day she strides up to Harding, standing there with her bags piled at his feet, scoops up her belongings before he has a chance to protest, and strides carefully away.

"Alice."

When she turns to look at him there are tears on her cheeks, but the way she holds her face is such that you wouldn't know she was crying if not for those tears, and the wide, red-rimmed look of her eyes.

"Goo' luhck."

She nods at him again.

"You too."

And then she's lost in a flurry of swarming crowds, just a single bright cap of hair billowing amongst the colors and the hot swell of bodies like a feather adrift in the sea. 

* * *

I've swept the sea and learned the skies, reflected in thousands of starry eyes, but learned to covet no such prize, or trap my breath in shrill surprise, for as the solemn sparrow flies, each turn, bereft of you, mere lies...and all my scattered thoughts and cries...

Or something like that, I know I once read in one of those great, dusty books my Father provided me with in my childhood. Something about a thousand skies, or perhaps a thousand suns, each one glowing a different hue or tone on a strange horizon. I don't think I'd ever properly noticed it before, but as I tumbled into that vast, dizzying unknown below, the objects that adorned that path were no less than snippets of the dying horizons which I'd glimpsed from behind a thousand foreign eyes. Untold adventures I'd had, and all of them fantastic and gaudy enough to be something I merely dreamed up. Perhaps all of this was merely a dream, and I my childhood self curled up safely upon the carpet with my dearest kittens, all snug and content in our mediocre existence within the looking glass...

* * *

Tea cups made of china so thin she could see the crags of rock encasing them on the other side, painted by the delicate, feminine hands of a Tibetan monk as they sipped a strange, heady drink within the solemn walls of a monastery leaden with the seductive power of so many spices and potions that she felt she could evaporate in the heavy air and ghost through the halls forever.

A tiny figurine, whittled from the bones of a beast that had sucked in its last, choking breath of arid Egyptian air, and then collapsed in a heap upon an unnamed pillar of sand; bones so bleached white by that sun and rubbed smooth by that sand when at last the soft, tanned hands of some sharp-eyed child shaped them into the form of a minuscule cat that Alice would sometimes rub it against her cheek and squint her eyes against the glow of it.

The pocketwatch of that dear, grim-eyed young fisherman that was swept into her life by a rainstorm along with the ship carrying her and her cargo of six hundred tons of the finest English tea. A wild storm had brushed them into the grip of some treacherous cliffs, and they would have lost their entire stock to the vast, sucking ocean if she hadn't dove into the sweltering belly of the ship and secured the crates within reach. A fool's errand, they called it, and seemingly proved correct, as Alice was swept out of the gaping hole and into the ocean, merely to be pulled to safety by this strapping young lad with eyes to rival the sky after that wonderfully tumultuous storm.

A pocketwatch, he'd said as he pressed the cool metal into her palm, so that she might be just as aware of every minute they spent apart as he himself; whispered such loving words to a girl he'd just become acquainted to, and then spilled out of her life with all the wild fury of that storm.

A quill, the feather plucked from the breast of the most gloriously beautiful macaw that she had glimpsed in a Brazilian market, the crowds bustling back and forth in such rapid succession she felt very much like a bird herself. Plucked from its breast before she purchased it with a sizable portion of the funds she'd just received for selling 20 tons of fine Egyptian silk, and then released it not a moment later (much to the shock and dismay of the vendor).

A marble she'd won from some boys hunched in a circle in an alleyway she happened to pass in Ireland. The yellow of it shone with that same, mischievous glint that she'd seen in the eyes of the eldest, a tall, lean child with delicate features and dark red lips and even darker red hair.

All of these places and people and suns and moons, passing through her fingers like sand. Somehow she was aware then, that all of this was what she'd be sacrificing. Every little trinket slipping by her in the near-darkness revealing another small fraction of a dream that she was slowly waking from. 

* * *

I recall there was the smell of lilacs in the air, but that the season and place seemed jumbled up. Not to mention the fact that merely overcoming the vertigo of relinquishing those artifacts from another life and tumbling into this one made me merely clench my eyes shut for a moment, chest undulating beneath each unsteady breath. I recall tangling my fingers in the lush curtain of foliage I had fallen upon, hanging on for fear of spinning out into space like clay upon a potter's wheel as the world span and span and span.

When I finally peered up from my floral bed, I couldn't see past the tangles of roses and rhododendrons and lillies, and so for a full minute I lay there and contemplate the possibility that somehow I had stumbled into the wrong rabbit hole, and ended up someplace else entirely. But then there came the soft whisper of the wind in the midst of my fretting, washing over my body in a warm wave that pulled with it the scent of those flowers, and of scones and fresh tea in the distance, and I straightened at once.

I was filled with such wild glee that I took to running, heedless of the fact that I was hopelessly lost amidst a foreign field of flowers, or even to the fact that it was currently night, and any hope of catching sight of a familiar landmark was thusly squelched.

And yet none of that mattered because I was free, tossed into this land where the night air was hot and thick and suffused with the heavy scent of a thousand things, each more beautiful than the last. And oh, the footing beneath was so clear and sure, and the crunch of my shoes against the gravel all the more glorious for the way they held their ground; no constant rock and sway, the dance of the earth's discontent. And the green all around me!

Green to rival the fields of Ireland or the exotic jewels of Persia or the jungles of Africa! Green to fill my heart with liquid promise! And the moon egging me on, pushing my body forward with jerky footsteps, each more frantic than the last. A great stone drum like those of Africa, that resounding echo of its great voice resonating in my heart and calling forth the wild spirits there.

I sincerely believe I would have continued running forever, hopelessly lost and yet unaware of it, if not for the sound of china clinking in the distance. A faint trilling, perhaps a mile or more away, but a sound so ingrained into the very fabric of my own heart that I'd recognize it anywhere. 

* * *

I'd have nightmares sometimes about broken mirrors. Walking up to a looking glass in the midst of darkness and reaching out to brush its cool surface, only to have it shatter into a million shards beneath my touch. My own face reflected in a broken array, a smile refracted into a twisted, mottled thing, perhaps a grimace.

Or worse yet, when that glass didn't shatter. When it remained solid and beautiful beneath my waxing affectations, and when it revealed to me nothing but a world of bleached colors and fruitless dreams. When there was just Alice, Alice in my too-blue dress and too-blonde curls, a little girl still, standing in the middle of a gray world. 

* * *

By the time I reached the perimeter of the small clearing wherein my friends and I had often took tea together, the night sky had cascaded into a dark brew of storm clouds. At first I wasn't even aware of the large drops pelting me from above, so transfixed was I with the single point of the full moon on the horizon, shining like a beacon of hope through the bleak grey shroud surrounding it. A sliver of a moon now, with the long wispy tendrils of rain clutching at it from both sides, a single line of pure white pointing, it seemed, towards my destination. When I finally pushed back the long stalks of grass to reveal the familiar table, I was entirely soaked. Some part of my heart half expected to see nothing there; more so even than a conspicuous lack of company.

I half expected to see nothing at all, just the continuation of a field that had grown so wild and unkempt in my absence as to wipe everything I once knew off the face of the earth, or wheresoever it was that this place was grounded. My heart half knew that I wouldn't see nothing, of course, but a rather glorious something. I half knew that I'd see him.

He was sitting there, alone, at the head of the table. Said table was set neatly before him, a raiment of silver flung over it, and a set of delicate blue china all about. As he sat, he stared vacantly at the teacups, which by now were spilling over with rainwater, each drop hitting their surface with an audible splash and causing him to flinch slightly beneath it. The sound of the drops hitting the silver spoons was almost deafening in the silence of the rain.

And it struck me just then, how gloriously morose he seemed, and how infinitely beautiful. His skin glowed a translucent pearly white in the half-light tossed from the moon. His hair, darkened by the rain to a deep red, was plastered all about his face. Water dripped from the rim of his hat in a steady rhythm, and yet he still stared off into some patch of space far beyond my imagination, his jaw set in an expression of raw determination, his eyes a pallid grey-green that released phantoms into the night.

Sitting there like one of those great marble statues I had glimpsed in Rome, undisturbed even by the playful wind that stirred the corners of the tablecloth. I wondered what sort of listless, glassy-eyed sculptor had formed such a thing; how many dreamless nights he had spent forming the expression of discontent upon those lips, or capturing sorrow in those eyes. Such a perfect thing to be set upon a parapet and highlighted for the world to see by that tremendous bulb in the night.

How beautiful he was, with the statuesque form of a Roman god, an Adonis or Mercury. Yes, Mercury, with all his guile and inventiveness, all his bombastic charm. So mercurial, in all his capricious moods. So like the liquid silver that I had glimpsed in glass instruments all across the world. Or the same silver spun into fantastic shapes. A silver spoon; the soft, twinkling sounds of the raindrops soaking the instruments before him.

How often had I stolen some beautiful silver spoon in the past, held it against my lips in the darkness of my tiny room in the depths of the ship, tasted the coldness that lurked there? Ran my fingers through the soft silk tapestries from China, let melt upon my tongue a sample of German chocolates, let simmer in my mind the complacent, open face of an Italian child, his gray eyes and dark hair shocking and horrifying me for some strange reason? How empty everything seemed in comparison with this moment.

How dazzling he was, dim and fuzzy and broken, sitting alone in the rain. 

* * *

She had never been able to surprise him before, but perhaps the combination of his deep ruminations and the now overwhelming torrent of rain had overcome his usual senses. All Alice knew was that when she laid her hand upon his shoulder, he jumped and looked about himself frantically, as if just noticing where he was. When his eyes finally did alight upon her face, it was with a vague expression of perplexity, and Alice had the immediate notion that he wasn't truly sure of himself, or her, at all. His irises clouded over with a slight green hue, but they remained layered with thick grey storms, and unless it was her imagination, red now suffused the battling hues as well.

"Alice?" he asked dreamily, his face more stern and solemn than she had ever seen it before.

"Indeed, I seem to have fallen asleep again" she replied curtly, and a depth entered his eyes which stunned her.

And then, as if painted over with the watery tip of an artist's brush, they hazed over once more. He stared at her with the same vacant, stupid expression of a sleepwalker.

"I very much think myself to be dreaming again" he whispered, reverent, as if the discovery of this was wonderful to behold.

She understood the sentiment- that rare, gratifying feeling of realizing the state of one's consciousness and thus commanding it completely- and yet she loathed it all the same.

"Does it really make so much difference whom dreams whom? Perhaps dreaming of a dream might counteract the dream itself, and make it reality?"

He grinned slightly, his wide gap-toothed smile that made her heart ache. And yet that grey, faded tone remained in his eyes, as listless and cold as the ocean in the midst of a storm.

"The imagination is such a wonderful thing, don't you think? The real Alice would say something very much like that."

She frowned at him, tipping back and forth upon her toes with a stern expression upon her face that was most certainly not a pout.

"Then perhaps I should prove to you I'm the real Alice? List for you all the "m" words I have collected in many, mystical, murderous realms? Or maybe I am dreaming. Tell me, if you are the real Hatter, how is a raven like a writing desk? I'm certain you never told me...or was it I who never told you?"

He stared at her for a long time after that, and she ceased her rocking in order to examine his sober expression.

"It's no good" he crooned at last, backing away from her as if she were some horrible, nightmarish thing, "I've dreamt you too many times. I'm afraid Imma nah much righ' in the 'ead, and I...I...see thin's...when the moon comes."

His accent thickened as he grew and more distressed, until he was ringing the tips of his fingers, heedless of the thimbles that resided there.

"The moon?" she asked, curiosity piqued.

"Aye, every nigh' o' the full moon, I sit up an' dream of you, but you never come."

His voice was barely a whisper now, but more of a strangled, sobbing thing that made her heart split in two. She stopped advancing towards him, her arms falling down to her sides.

"Then maybe we're both insane" she trailed off, glancing up at the full moon, now half-consumed by shadow. "But then again, all of the best people are."

He paused at this, his hands shaking as they worked their way to his head, where he clutched at his hair with mounting desperation.

"Jus' stop right there, missus! Jus' leave me alone!" he screamed. She rounded on him now, stepping forward into his personal space.

"I'm afraid that's one thing I can never do, Hatter. I'm possessed of much, much, too muchness for something so Abovelandish as that. And if you insist on claiming that I'm a figment of your imagination, then I'll just have to do something even you wouldn't expect of me" she hissed threateningly, and then wrapped her arms about his waist.

He stilled instantly, stiff and tense in her arms. After a moment she leaned upwards, bringing the pads of her fingers against the hollow of his throat and whispering in his ear.

"I have missed you, Tarrant, like the sun misses the moon each and every night. If you'll forgive me, I'd like to take you up on your generous offer now...to stay here...with you." After a moment's pause he relaxed, and his eyes returned to some of their previous color.

"Alice?" he whispered, astonished.

"The Alice" she corrected, and he pressed her to his chest so tightly she felt ready to suffocate.

"There have been no sunrises here since you left. I think you stole them all" he whispered, his hands stroking her back in a kind of frenzied, desperate wonder.

A million skies, through foreign eyes. Yes, she did steal them all.

"They weren't as lovely as you'd expect."

He laughed then, a high, chirping laugh that made her glow in his arms.

"Of course ye' kin stay 'ere" he returned, tongue thick once more.

"But Alice..."

"Hmm?"

"I coul'nt take it...if you were to leave again'...I..."

She kissed him.

"Dear Tarrant, there will never be any need to worry about such a thing."

There are moments of startling clarity, when all at once the desires of the heart converge into a single, simple whole. When the purposes of life are laid before us in such startling colors that we gasp and our eyes burn to see it. There are moments of such absolute, perfect contentment that everything before it could have merely been a dream. There are dreams that are sweeter than reality, dreams we don't have to wake from. She never woke from this one again. 


End file.
